Patient experience

Meeting your needs

When the Royal Free Hospital was founded back in 1828, our mission was to provide care and prevent ill health. Our mission remains, but the way we provide healthcare has changed dramatically since then. The changes are in part due to changes in technology and in the economics underpinning healthcare but we also make changes as a result of patient choice, patient opinion and patient feedback.

We value feedback from our patients and service users and need to seek and understand your views, so that we can work towards meeting your needs and expectations and, ultimately, improve patient experience.

Patient engagement

The Trust receives lots of valuable feedback through our complaints and patient advice & liaison service (PALS) teams every day, and we aim to use that feedback to improve practice wherever possible (more detailed information on complaints and PALS is available on the complaints and PALS sections of the website).

We are also involved in various work across the Trust with the aim of engaging our patients in the development of services, improving practice and changing our patients’ experiences for the better. Listening to the views of our patients and visitors helps us to better understand what we are doing right and what we need to improve. We may carry out:

Real-time surveys while people are still in our care so that we can feedback to wards and take action quickly.

Short questionnaires that patients complete just before they leave hospital.

The Friends and Family Test (FFT) – see FFT section for more information on what this entails.

Detailed surveys sent after they have returned home.

Working in partnership

The Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust is committed to working in partnership with patients, the public and local communities to ensure that its services are both relevant and responsive to local needs.

Providing an excellent experience for our patients, staff and service users is central to the trust's governing objectives. The trust is therefore keen to further involve patients, the public and wider stakeholder communities to help develop our services.

Patient co-design is an approach that enables staff and patients or other service users to co-design services and/or care pathways together in partnership. It involves gathering experiences from patients and staff through interviewing, observation and group discussion. Staff and patients are then brought together to explore the findings and work in small groups to identify and implement changes that will improve the care pathway.

The trust has established clinical practice groups to commence work in this area, and there are a number of pieces of work underway to improve patient pathways. Examples of changes to practice, made as a result of patient feedback, complaints and concerns received or our patient engagement work can be found below.

Get in touch

If you’ve recently experienced using our services and have a suggestion on how and where we can improve the quality of what we do then we’d love to hear from you.

Have you an idea which could help us improve our services or do you feel there is an area which could be more efficient? What did you value most about the care you received and the way that it was delivered?

If so, please contact the patient experience team using the contact details below.